Keeping the jukes jumping

They are to the music industry what unicorns are to reality:  
magical, mythical beasts.  But spinning those tunes on vinyl, 
they're the life of the party.
By Dean Kuipers, Special to The Times
August 10, 2006

At your service Vinyl fetish Petty cache

Don MULLER stands in his living room, grinning like a caffeinated teenager, clearly dazzled by the magic he has wrought.  The playroom in his Van Nuys ranch home features four classic jukeboxes crowded around a small dance floor, and lightbulbs are flashing like an arcade around the room and across the ceiling.

"See how this model has a speaker on top?" he shouts, patting a 1946 AMI "mother-of-plastic" Model A jukebox, as Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" comes blasting out at about ear-level.  "That was so it would play over the top of the tables.  See, this would be the music for a whole restaurant or dance hall, and it only took one machine in the corner to do it.  It really kicks it out!"

Muller is clearly enjoying himself, and his enthusiasm is infectious.  To thousands of Southern Californians who own jukeboxes that play vinyl records, and the smattering of restaurants and bars that still keep them around, he is something of a guru, a figure familiar to the rich and famous, to music junkies and nostalgia freaks.  Now in his 35th year as sole proprietor of Jukeboxes Unlimited, Muller has seen the industry turn toward CD jukes and, recently, to Internet-connected players that download songs from massive databases.  He is one of only two guys in L.A. who still make house calls to service record-playing jukeboxes.  He's a gadget freak and is the first one to admit it.

But it would be a mistake to think that the jukebox fetish is all about these lights and bubbles and fake mother-of-pearl.

"Oh, no," he says, his face getting serious. He stops what he's doing, which is punching up song after song.  "I need to show you something."

We move swiftly through the back door.  Behind his house is another building, a garage the size of a small barn.  He swings the door open and says, "This is a lifetime's worth of music."

It's more than that. It's several dozen lifetimes' worth. It's the most staggering collection of vinyl imaginable. In that garage, loosely arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves, in banana boxes, in crates, in retail record racks, are approximately 300,000 records.  Seventy-eight RPMs, 45s, LPs, picture discs.  Most of them are popular titles from every decade from the 1930s to the present, but there are also box sets, rare pressings, promos, a thousand Frank Sinatra discs, and a lot of Christmas music.  That's what the people want, Muller says: those seasonal tunes that were played so often during the '50s and '60s and '70s that any American household could sing them from heart.

Not everyone shares the reverence.  Muller has repaired, reconditioned and rented jukeboxes from his house for 35 years.  Muller, who is 61, runs an outfit called Jukeboxes Unlimited in Granada Hills (and its offshoot, Jukeboxes for Rent, which rents to film and TV studios and for events). He is the go-to jukebox guy on the Westside when your classic '50s Seeburg or Wurlitzer has a jammed record arm.

"The kids don't know what a 45 or a single is. They don't know what vinyl is," Muller says. "For me, it's all about the 45's.  The vinyl.  The feel.  That's where the emotion is.  You put on a CD jukebox and you have thousands of titles. You put on a vinyl jukebox and you've got 100 to 200 titles ... and that's special.  Each record is hand-picked.  It's an art."

Muller bought his first jukebox in 1971 from the Helm Distributing Co. in Van Nuys.  His business is essentially a one-man show. He answers the phone, makes house calls, stores and services about 30 jukeboxes in his garage and makes custom music selections to order for his rental boxes.  When someone is having a ’50s party, he'll stock the box with appropriate records, deliver and set it up.  The biggest single source of his business is film and TV rentals: His boxes have appeared on everything from "Happy Days" to a Bruce Springsteen video to a Miller beer ad.

In this time, he has watched the jukeboxes that have been around since 1927 go from ubiquitous music machines to collectors' items.  There used to be 600,000 jukeboxes in restaurants and bars in the U.S.  Today, that number is more like 150,000, according to the Amusement & Music Operators Assn. in Chicago, a trade group that publishes a magazine called RePlay.  These are no longer coin-operated (they play for free), and they are invariably CD-based.  They are the sort of things most people wouldn't look at twice.

So who's buying all these classic and semi-classic vinyl jukeboxes?  Plenty of people.  In this country, there are a handful of national and regional dealers, plenty of enthusiasts, and an Internet community of jukebox nuts who buy and sell on websites such as JukeboxesOnline.com.  There are also knockoff juke manufacturers, who make jukeboxes that look like the classics but play CDs.  These sell for as little as a few hundred bucks in all the novelty malls.  And then there are the high-end producers, like Rock-Ola Manufacturing Corp. in Torrance, which makes a beautiful replica of a classic Rock-Ola 1426 from 1946 that plays CDs and sells for $7,999.

The range of people who own jukeboxes is similarly surprising. Tom Petty has two. Record producer Richard Perry has a Seeburg in the living room of his house on Sunset Strip.  The Art Deco room has a bar and walls full of instruments and gold and platinum records. Like Muller, who sold him his 1978-79 Seeburg Disco jukebox, his primary interest is in the music.

"I was particularly fortunate to find this gem," he says, beaming.  "It sort of has an Art Deco look, like it belongs here.  This was the only sound source they used in the disco; they'd just crank it up.  This is probably the most powerful jukebox I've ever heard.  The room gets pumping when that thing is cranked."

As a demonstration, he turns up "Love TKO"; at 50 watts per channel, it's flapping the potted plants.  Plus, he affirms, the jukebox experience is hands-on fun. And everybody, himself included, loves to choose music.

"I dare you to name one person who doesn't find it fun to stand around the jukebox and be part of programming whatever music they want to hear," he says.

For Perry, who has produced albums for artists from Streisand to Ringo Starr to Carly Simon to the Pointer Sisters, and continues today to have huge hits with albums of standards by Rod Stewart, stocking the jukebox is an art unto itself.  His has 80 selections, and his standards are high.  He picks a song like Van Morrison's "Moondance," for instance.  "Come on; that's a song that's great to hear anytime, anywhere.  I strive to have every song as meaningful as that," he says.

So his machine is packed with '40s big-band classics such as Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade," a smattering of doo-wop and lots of R&B, Sinatra and classic blues.  There are about 60 selections, he says, that he'll never change.  The other 20 slots, however, are for contemporary stuff, experiments. And don't try to tell him that a CD jukebox would give him more selections.

"The CD jukeboxes have hundreds and thousands of selections, and it leaves too much to someone else's potential bad taste," he says with a smile.

For others, taste may have other connotations.  Children of the alternative '80s and '90s find a jukebox can be an ideal display site for that offbeat record, that alternative single.  Dan Epstein, a writer for Revolver magazine and the author of "Big Hair and Plastic Grass," a history of baseball in the '70s, loves his 1972 Seeburg in large part because it reminds him of the punk rock days at the Coconut Teaser on Sunset.

"That club had a Seeburg with this guy's amazing collection of first-pressing 45s," Epstein says, "and the jukebox was the entertainment between sets."

Epstein's jukebox became a central fixture in his house after he got it from Muller a few years ago.

"My roommates and I used to hang out on the porch looking into the living room watching the thing play," he says, "because we loved listening to them and watching the records change. That's one of the great things about vinyl jukeboxes."

Everybody, in fact, who has a jukebox seems to have strong opinions on jukeboxes.  Dan Epstein's older brother, the former Rhino Records artistic director Sam Epstein (no relation to Dan) claims nothing can usurp his 1958 Seeburg with 200 selections.  He's a die-hard collector of 45s, now owning more than 10,000, and contends the ideal sonic and aesthetic environment for discovering music is the jukebox.

"The 45 is the way it was originally intended, you know? For a lot of early rock 'n' roll, a lot of vintage vocalists, even the punk movement," Sam Epstein says.  "It's more organic than any of the digital media, especially if you get an old Motown 45, or an old Chess 45, and you hear Howlin' Wolf or Bo Diddley.  It's kind of like the whole box rumbles and the room rumbles, and it's different each time you play it."

Having been at Rhino more than 25 years, Sam Epstein also loves how what he calls "feeding the jukebox" leads him to new music.  His interests have led him to make a film about the blues, still in production, called "When Blue Men Sang the Whites." He'll ask friends going home to Nigeria to bring him fresh juju singles, or will set up his whole jukebox with Bakersfield country.

"For those who really like to play the records, this was the machine," Epstein says of the Seeburg.

Tom Blackwell points out this is an urge the downloadable or Internet jukebox may not scratch sufficiently.  He notes that all commercial jukeboxes have about 20 songs on them that are the hot sellers, the hits, and it's always been that way.  The Internet jukes offer so many songs, and such little editing, that they're actually not as fun.  So far, he understands, they're also not making much money.

Sam Epstein points out that this is exactly why the home jukebox is now so important. It's about selecting music, programming it.  The box keeps the 45 alive, and 45's keep whole genres of music alive.

"Pop music is always going to be about what sells," he says.  "And the whole fun of my jukebox is discovering things that were an obscurity — one of mine was Sugar Pie DeSanto.  She was a singer, a pal of Etta James, still lives up in San Francisco, putting out records.  You'll never find that stuff downloadable, or whatever.  It just doesn't make marketable sense.  It's kind of like the haphazard route of history."